It is always easy to blame one person or several people for the failure of a sales process or the failure for the whole sales team within a company. Sometimes those people are just symptoms of a different problem. Perhaps a greater problem. Though it easy to find fault, it requires honesty to determine the true causes of sales process failure. There are only five causes to a sales process problem.

There are only five distinct areas that cause the underperformance.

1. Organizational or Systemic problems can crush the sales process. This cause of failure has very little to do with the salesperson but more the company as a whole. Some examples would be; production failures, antiquated paperwork system, service issues, flawed products and the list can go on and on. Remember, failure doesn't always point to one individual but many times the whole company or a time consuming procedural process could take up the majority of the salespersons time.

2. Obviously lack of skill will harm the sales process within your organization. Skill does not mean that a person can or cannot perform; but rather were they taught to perform. A classic example of this would be if a salesperson encounters an objection and doesn't handle it effectively causing a lost sale. This very well could be that the salesperson was never taught how to handle the objection and leverage it into a sale.

3. Leadership can destroy a perfectly good sales team. If a sales team fails to perform at the desired levels but never knew what the desired results were; how can you find fault with the sales team members? This failure points back to the leaders or coaches of that team. Many times sales managers are the direct reason the sales process fails.

4. Attitude is such a simple belief that has the power to make or break the sales process within your company. Attitude simply boils down to; does the salesperson want to do their job? Many times the best training, best companies and best coaches can not overcome a person that simply has issues and will always find reasons why they do not want to perform.

5. Now suppose you have gone through your sales process and determined that the attitude of the team is fine, there aren't any systemic problems to speak of, the training program is world class and the best coach in the business is running the sales team. Then the issue really boils down to the most simple yet hardest to determine fact; the salesperson lacks the ability to perform the job as needed.

Remember the five causes: Leadership, Organizational/Systemic, Skill, Attitude and Ability. When failure happens within the process level or all the way down to the individual level it is one or a combination of those five reasons. By being honest and assessing where the failure is happening you have taken a large step in correcting the true disconnect.